Change Management Tips and Tricks from Leaders in Global Organizations

Last Thursday, we hosted a webinar titled “Effective Change Management: Learning Lessons from Global Leaders” We tapped leaders from global companies, including:

• Denise Mesa, Director of Global Proposal Management at Workday
• Michelle Craven, Director of Business Operations at Parexel
• Greg Bentham, VP of North American Pre-Sales at Capgemini
  

During the session, Denise, Michelle, and Greg shared their recommendations for effective change management and making adoption easy for their Ombud users. While this session was focused on their experience with Ombud, you can take these pointers and apply them to any change you’re making in your organization. 

Below, we’ve compiled some of our favorite nuggets from the discussion:

Key Takeaways about Effective Change Management

Before you start changing, make a gameplan, and create a change management “team.”

At Parexel, each time they make a big decision such as implementing new software or re-organizing a team, they create a change management team and a “change manager.” This team and manager, on top of their normal job responsibilities, take ownership of the project to ensure its success. 

This way, they can plan ahead of time and map out the entire adoption plan, strategy, and identify potential pitfalls.

“Everybody is busy these days. So, we hold a pre-meeting with a wide group of different users and that enabled us to try and get everybody on board beforehand. Does it work 100% percent of the time? No, it doesn't. But, you know, I think the biggest area of focus for adoptions like this is always train, train, train. 

The more that you can offer the different levels of training from using different methods, whether it is PowerPoint or face to face. With virtual meetings like this, we always have an area where they can ask questions, so that they are not at their home, trying to figure out how the new technology is working.”

Emphasize on-going enablement and training; don’t let it be an afterthought.

At Workday, Denise’s team is focused heavily on ongoing enablement, not only for her proposal team but for their broader user community. This comes in various different forms such as: live trainings, step-by-step guides, process snippet videos, and a Slack channel for all things Ombud. 

“What this enables us and our users to do is if they have a question or they need help with something they can ask it right in that Slack channel. And really get near-real-time support because we have members of our proposal team who monitor that channel and respond to any questions the broader team has. One of the other benefits of having that channel is we've started proactively posting information like tips and tricks and feature enhancements that have been released.”

Finally, they also ran a check-in survey with their team internally about 6 months after implementing. “We asked questions around how the training is going, the user experience, and the quality of the content within the platform. That gave us direct feedback so we could then take that and figure out our strategy for going forward in terms of additional enablement or where we needed to make improvements, just to make it a better user experience.”

Foster continuous and candid communication; internally and with your vendor.  

For Greg, adoption and change management success hinges fully on one thing: communication. For true adoption of a platform or effective change, you need buy-in from everyone who will be impacted. It’s also helpful to have evangelists or “brand ambassadors” in your team to communicate the benefits and persuade silent dissenters to come over from the “dark side.” 

Finally, communication not only pertains internally to your organization but also pertains to your relationship with your vendor. “We had some adoption issues early on and our Ombud CSM actively collaborated with us and really got the adoption to go through the roof. So, sometimes you’ve got to say ‘hey, we need some help here, this thing isn’t working necessarily as planned.’”

Watch the Recording & Join for More!

For more insights and discussion around each of these topics, check out the recording.

Want to learn about Ombud best practices or how to effectively manage change within your organizations? Check out the recordings of our previous installments of the Ombud SCALE 2020 Webinar Series.